It’s a particularly busy summer this year, ferrying my 3 young apprentice’s about the place on their various ‘off school’ activities and teaching my youngest to swim and ride a bike without stabilizers by day… whilst indulging myself in a particularly worthwhile and rewarding illustration project by night.
Wallop is working with Sarah Boland’s ‘Healing’ Campaign to create a book, hopefully one of a series, for children undertaking daunting Cancer treatments and therapies. The ‘cancer is rubbish’ idea behind the books came from a discussion with Sarah, whom I first met whilst I was a designer and she was a producer and writer at the BBC. We discussed how my ‘Rubbish Pictures’ could be adapted to work alongside her stories, and this book is the result of those early conversations.
This book, about a boys journey through radiotherapy treatment, takes a sidestep from my usual ‘Rubbish characters style such as the more traditional ‘Fox’ and ‘Rooster’ It creates entire scenes more akin to ‘Rubbish Racing’ where the character and background are collaged out of appropriate material for the part of the story they are telling. I wanted to use content, or ‘rubbish’, familiar to the children reading the book and re use imagery from the hospital environment they are likely to be in. The character Jack, for example, whilst having already been through chemotherapy treatment and lost his hair, stays a very normal little boy throughout, full of beans and mischief. His clothes therefore are made up of recognizable beans food packaging and children’s paintings among other ‘rubbish’ textures.
We have been helped along the way by staff at the Royal Marsden Hospital whose advise has been invaluable and we are hoping to get this project complete over the next few weeks and into the hands of the children entering units such as those at The Marsden.
I’ll be blogging with the projects progress again soon :-)
